When you sell into more than one country, Shopify Markets asks how the URLs should be shaped: separate country domains, subfolders on one domain, or subdomains. The setup screen presents them as equivalent options. For search they are not, and changing your mind later means a migration.
Subfolders: the default answer for most stores
One domain, with country or language segments in the path. Everything you publish accumulates authority on a single domain, which matters most for stores that are not already established in each target market.
This is the right choice for the majority of merchants selling into several European countries from one brand. The operational cost is also lowest — one certificate, one analytics property, one set of redirects to reason about.
Country domains: strong signal, high cost
A separate domain per country sends the clearest possible geographic signal and is what large local competitors often have. It also splits your authority into separate buckets that each have to be built independently.
It makes sense when a market is genuinely a separate business — local warehousing, local pricing that is not a conversion of the home price, local customer service, local marketing spend. If a market has none of that, a dedicated domain is a cost without a corresponding benefit.
There is a legitimate non-search reason too: some markets have shopper expectations about local domains that outweigh the SEO arithmetic.
Subdomains: rarely the best of either
Subdomains sit between the two and usually inherit the disadvantages of both — weaker geographic signal than a country domain, less consolidated authority than a subfolder. They exist for infrastructure reasons more than search reasons.
If you are choosing purely on search, subfolders or country domains are the real options.
The part that breaks regardless of structure
Whatever you choose, hreflang has to be correct and reciprocal. Every language version must point at every other version, and each must point back. One-directional hreflang is ignored, which is why so many international stores have annotations that do nothing.
Each market version needs its own canonical pointing at itself. A common failure is a market version canonicalising to the home market, which tells search engines the local version should not be indexed at all.
Currency and price in structured data must match the market being served. A store publishing one hardcoded currency across three markets is publishing wrong prices to two of them.
Choosing without regret
Ask whether each market is a separate business or the same business in another language. Same business, different language — subfolders. Separate business with local operations behind it — country domains.
And decide before traffic accumulates. The structure is a migration once a market has rankings, and migrations lose something even when done well.
The store configuration behind either choice is covered in Shopify Markets for multiple countries. We set up international SEO as part of our Shopify SEO services.